February 7, 2025 • 54 mins
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Work n' Play Tech Series of the neXt Curve reThink Podcast, the series that brings you deep tech and industry analysis on the world of consumer and commercial devices and services. This podcast is geared toward enterprise IT and consumers looking for industry and tech trends that will matter as they choose, implement, and manage technologies for organization and/or personal utility and entertainment.
The Work n' Play Tech Series is co-hosted by Leonard Lee, Executive Analyst at neXt Curve, Anurag Agrawal, Chief Global Analyst at Techaisle, and Prakash Sangam, Principal Analyst at Tantra Analyst.
In this inaugural episode, the hosts discuss the headline trend of 2024, the AI PC. How did it start, where are we today, and where do we think we are going. The hosts also provide their impressions of several AI PCs they have been recently testing including:
💻 Lenovo's X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition (powered by Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 Lunar Lake)
💻 Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7x (powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite)
💻 Dell's XPS 13 (powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite)
💻 Samsung Book4 Elite (powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite)
💻 Apple MacBook Air 15" (powered by Apple Silicon M2)
The gang touch on the following topics on the subject of the AI PC:
➡️ Introducing co-hosts Anurag Agrawal and Prakash Sangam (2:07)
➡️ Introducing the Work n' Play Series on neXt Curve's reThink Podcast (3:20)
➡️ The gang kicks off Episode 1 with the AI PC (4:07)
➡️ What is the state of the AI PC and where is it going? (6:50)
➡️ The AI PC in a state of "experimentation" & discovery (11:13)
➡️ Is the AI PC and GenAI finding a home with creators? (16:04)
➡️ The outlook for the big AI PC refresh super cycle (20:24)
➡️ What are the differentiated use cases for the AI PC? (21:08)
➡️ The cost benefit analysis of upgrading to AI PC (25:38)
➡️ Key AI PC takeaways & highlights from CES 2025 (28:50)
➡️ AI PC Reviews & favorites from Lenovo, Dell, and Samsung (36:15)
➡️ Agentic AI on AI PCs and beyond? (46:05)
Hit both Leonard, Anurag, and Prakash up on LinkedIn and take part in their industry and tech insights.
Check out Anurag and Techaisle at www.techaisle.com.
Check out Prakash and his research at Tantra Analyst at www.tantranalyst.com.
Please subscribe to our podcast which will be featured on the neXt Curve YouTube Channel. Check out the audio version on BuzzSprout or find us on your favorite Podcast platform.
Also, subscribe to the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com for the tech and industry insights that matter.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Anurag Agrawal (00:06):
Next curve.
Leonard Lee (00:09):
Hey everyone.
Welcome to this next curve.
Rethink podcast episode, wherewe break down the latest tech
and industry events, happeningsinto the insights that matter.
And I'm Leonard Lee, executiveanalyst at next curve and in
this inaugural.
Consumer and commercial techseries.
we're going to be kicking thingsoff with an intro to the
(00:32):
podcast.
So, you know, a little bit moreabout what we're going to try to
do with the series and then,also introduce my co hosts.
Who are Anna, excuse me, and arug, uh, agrawal agrawal.
Oh, my gosh, I'm reallybutchering that.
I'm so sorry.
I mean, I love this guy too.
Anurag Agrawal (00:52):
How can I do this to you?
No, I'm so sorry.
Listen, don't worry about it.
my wife says that I should havechanged my name to Andy long
time ago.
Leonard Lee (01:01):
I
Anurag Agrawal (01:03):
love
Leonard Lee (01:04):
that.
Yes, do that.
Do that.
But hey, look, this gentleman isa legend.
He is an amazing individual.
I'm so glad to be collaboratingwith you on this.
he is the founder and the chiefglobal analyst of tech aisle.
And, we have our good friendPrakash Sangam of Contra
(01:26):
Analysts.
And of course, you know him asthe founder.
And the principal analyst andgentlemen, it's so good to have
you guys on looking forward tothis.
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (01:35):
Glad to be here.
Glad to be here, man.
Leonard Lee (01:38):
Before we get started, please remember to like
share, react, and comment onthis episode.
Also subscribe here on YouTubeand on Buzzsprout and listen to
us on your favorite podcast.
also just want to make sureeveryone knows that opinions and
statements by my guests arestrictly their own and don't
reflect mine or those ofNextCurve.
And, we're doing this to providean open forum for discussion and
(02:01):
debate on all things consumerand commercial tech.
So.
With that, why don't you bothtake a moment to talk about your
background and, your firm.
Anurag Agrawal (02:12):
Leonard, thank you for having me on this
podcast yes, I lead, TACAL,which is a global research and
analyst firm focused on threevery complex segments of the
market.
They are the small businesses,the mid sized businesses, and
the channel partner community.
And we derive our intelligencefrom the ground up, essentially,
which means that we dotremendous amount of surveys
(02:35):
with, these three segments, aswell as have formal and informal
dialogues with them.
Leonard Lee (02:41):
Yeah, and it's really, really, amazing work
that you and your team does.
I just wanted to emphasize thatinto our audience.
Make sure if you don't know who,you know, and tech, I'll are,
you really should know,especially if you're In the,
enterprise, S and B, tech game.
So, uh, Prakash really quickly,everyone knows you already, but
(03:02):
go ahead.
Prakash Sangam (03:03):
Just like any normal tech industry analyst
looking at wireless compute.
glad to be here to give myopinion.
Leonard Lee (03:11):
Of course.
Yeah.
Everyone knows you already.
You've been on several times andit's really great to have honor
on for the 1st time.
And, yeah, so a little bit ofcontext for what we're doing
here.
We're we really want to look atbroadly.
consumer and commercial slashenterprise tech.
And so anything ranging fromsmartphones all the way to,
(03:31):
workstations and what have youthat whole breadth of, devices
that, are pretty importantsegment of not only electronics
industry.
But, also for the semiconductorindustry.
So there's going to be a littlebit of that tie in that we're
going to have with all the semistuff that, we, cover, but,
really want to give the audiencehere a view from an end user
(03:54):
perspective and, you know, thechannel perspective, the OEM's
perspective.
And, bridge that divide, betweena marks and the semiconductor
industry.
So, with that, we're going tokick things off with the AIPC
because everyone talks about it.
A lot of companies that we talkto.
I mean, that's like the biggestthing, right?
(04:15):
For the last couple of years, Ithink.
Is it last couple of years orwas it just last year?
I think it really kind of wentcrazy last year.
Right?
Prakash Sangam (04:22):
Last year with, Microsoft making this big
announcement, redefining PCwith, copilot plus PCs, right?
Last year, That's when westarted and went into high gear
with many launches and so on.
it was their own event.
right after the day before theevent, they announced the set of
Cooper Places based on, CalCom.
Anurag Agrawal (04:43):
so yeah.
Microsoft had a very specificevent
Yeah.
Where they actually.
Brought in all the PC OEMs thatthey
announced,
and Dell was the one that came out right out of
the gate with seven differentmodels.
To be fair, HP had announcedtheir foray into AI PCs earlier,
(05:05):
I think it was the winter of2023.
Yeah.
Dell came out, with some, really big
announcement, their entire lineup with Inspiron and Latitude
and XPS and everything likethat.
They were all AI enabled PCs.
Yes, which was actually thefirst one was the copilot plus
BC and then.
(05:26):
Later on, it started becoming AIpc.
Leonard Lee (05:28):
Yep.
Yeah.
And if I'm not mistaken, theevent was billed, right?
Prakash Sangam (05:32):
built and then, and they had a first special
day, the day before theyactually went.
Yeah.
For co plus PCs.
And actually, AI PCs were kindbefore copal plus PCs, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
so.
I mean, the IPCs go pilot noweverything clubbed under the
IPCs.
it's what's in the name, right?
So,
Leonard Lee (05:52):
yeah, and really the net new has been the MPU,
right?
That really is the bigdifference in terms of, the new
IP on chip that, everybody wasreally making a big deal out of.
And so a lot of this reallyoriginating out of AIPC.
But then, as you mentioned.
There was, the Copilot plus PCand, prior to that, of course,
(06:18):
we had Meteor Lake that wasannounced the literally the year
before.
And then even prior to that, AMDhad introduced their 1st
generation of, um, let's say,let's call it AI capable.
It wasn't, they didn't call, wedidn't call them MPUs at the
time.
It was like, really weird.
but even before then it wasApple, Apple Silicon, that was
(06:43):
the first to have an MPU.
and they, I think they really,they, they call neural engine,
right?
But it is basically you.
And that was like, I mean, geez,are we're going on almost five
years, but, yeah.
So, Where do you guys think weare?
what is the journey been likefor the AI PC?
And, where do you think it'sgoing?
Anurag Agrawal (07:01):
So I can start it off, Prakash, and obviously,
our insights come from the dataitself, right?
So what we are finding withinour research, and we did a
global research of over 2, 200businesses that covered SMBs and
enterprise customers, right?
we find that There is aninterest in AIPCs, right, and
(07:28):
the interest is very kind ofinteresting in a way that let's
first understand that thesebusinesses actually at least 50
percent of them really thinkthat AIPC could be the relevant
foundation.
That is the core AI foundationfor their entire AI stack.
So that is very interestingfinding, right?
(07:50):
Yeah.
We also find that while AI PCsare seen as crucial for AI
solutions, but the currentadoption is kind of low.
In a way, what we are seeing isthat awareness is there, but
only about 14 percent of thebusinesses are really thinking
about purchasing AI PCs.
On the other flip side is theyare thinking more in terms of co
(08:14):
pilot plus PC, which is veryinteresting that they are not
able to connect the dots betweenwhat's a co pilot plus PC versus
an AI PC, right?
Leonard Lee (08:24):
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (08:26):
So I think that's, going to be interesting
as to how you bridge thateducation gap as to what is an
AI PC and what's a co pilot plusPC.
Prakash Sangam (08:35):
Yeah, I, my pet peeve is.
They want a PC, whoever isbuying it, they don't know yet
what they'll use it for, right?
Most of the guys who are buyingthese latest PCs, more for
performance and battery lifeand, you know, all the premium
features they offer, because Imean, you know, frankly, if you
are in the market for a premiumPC.
(08:57):
You want it or not, you'll buy acopilot plus PC, right?
Because that's where they'restarting.
I still don't see a lot ofapplications.
They're, they're, they're buyingthe species for a.
The application they're dying torun on.
It's basically, we are in theupgrade cycle.
We know AI is becoming big.
(09:17):
There will be use cases andworkloads.
We have to, be ready for whenthat happens.
That's the reason let's start,buying these things so that we
have a good solid foundation.
At least that's what I found.
It is true.
Anurag Agrawal (09:30):
but also we are finding that many of these
customers are thinking about howthey can break up the.
The user workflow, right?
Because with the A.
I.
Coming into the picture, whichworkflows can run into the
cloud.
How can that orchestrate withwhat is running on the P.
C.
Versus on on Prem solution?
(09:51):
And
we are seeing there are four or five different
use cases popping up
quite
One is, you know, obviously the Yeah.
Code generation, right?
Hey, listen, let me run thecode.
Let me write new code locally onmy PC, by deploying some LLM
models, or even having, smalllanguage models.
And I will come to that in aminute because I've also
(10:13):
deployed deep seek on my, XPS 13as well as on, on my think pack,
Yeah.
So that works actually.
Great.
The other use cases we areseeing is around.
Data analysis and clientinsights generation, right?
that means, I don't need to beconnected to a cloud.
I can run some quick dataanalysis, on my.
(10:37):
Laptop itself, or if I'm withina customer environment, then I
can showcase what will happen,whether I'm in construction or
utilities or any type of, dentalor healthcare situation.
We are seeing a lot.
They are also experimentationgoing on in some targeted
advertising or campaigncreation.
(10:59):
And optimization.
Those are elements that areworkflows that are running
locally within the AI PCs.
but Prakash, you're right that,this is a PC that is in still
search of use cases and theproblem it is trying to solve.
Leonard Lee (11:13):
you use the term experimenting and experimental
quite a bit.
So, yeah, I mean, I guess that'sreally where we're at.
Right?
1 of the 1 of the things thatI've noticed also is.
there really aren't that manyapplications or functions or
features, that take advantage ofthe MPU.
And so one of the races that Ithink all of the chip makers are
(11:35):
making at the moment is to getthe software or ISVs and
developers to start coding tothe.
MPU, Or porting certain things,some of the applications
actually tend to be kind ofboring or really narrow and
function, but I think ultimatelymy, my observation is this over
(11:57):
the course of the latter part oflast year and coming into this
year.
Is actually the CPU is moreimportant than, uh, the MPU when
it comes to the AI PC, becauselike you were saying, Prakash,
battery life has really been thebiggest change that I've seen
over the past.
Year and a half, or maybe abouta year, right?
(12:19):
Especially with the introductionof, devices that are running on
the Snapdragon X series, you seethat dramatic change, but then
now with, Intel and AMD havingmade bets, I guess, in reaction
to the Nuvia acquisition, reallybringing some of that, um, CPU,
um, uh, CPU.
Efficiency power efficiency tobear and even, architecting and
(12:43):
bringing micro architecturesthat are geared more toward,
more performant, but also powerefficient compute.
Prakash Sangam (12:51):
Talking about Microsoft talk about redefining
pieces with AI.
I think that redefining is true,but it is at least right now is
more on the battery life, right?
I mean, day to day battery life,you've been talking about for
like what, five, six, sevenyears, but the laptops that came
last year, starting from Excelidand later with Lunar Lake are
(13:13):
the real ones where you arerealizing that seeing a full day
battery life without a charger,really.
Right.
That is an importanttransformation In my view.
I think that there is hugescope, especially in the
enterprise.
I would like to hear what thepress was thinking on rock from
your survey.
If you take the securityapplications, MDM applications,
the device managementapplications which are running
(13:36):
all the time that PC is runningon the background and they eat a
lot of CPU resources.
So for example, I've seen itliterally, you take a brand new
laptop running really good in avery good battery life.
super fast, the moment you puton a corporate image, that kinds
of, brings it to heart, theperformance speed goes almost,
(14:01):
two third of what I had seen andbattery life was really bad.
I think one of the reasons isthere are lots of the corporate
image.
So a lot of this security andother applications.
Which are running all the time,which I think would be
efficiently run on NPU.
So, I hope there is more,development on that.
(14:21):
And while we are looking for theboondoggle on AIU's case.
Anurag Agrawal (14:25):
Yeah, it's true.
And I think, you know, alongwith the battery life, the
weight, I think some or theother with the Snapdragon PCs,
they've managed to kind of keepthe weight extremely, extremely
light.
Which are one of the two veryimportant criteria for PC brand
and PC selection for most of theorganization.
And you are right, Prakash,because what we are saying
(14:46):
again, quoting some stats here,that the early adopters of AI
PCs we are seeing are within theIT department.
Prakash Sangam (14:54):
Yeah,
Anurag Agrawal (14:54):
77 percent of the organizations are actually
using these AIPCs internallywith the IT department.
Also, why?
Because of the fact that, theyare the vanguard for AIPC
adoption.
They are the one who areactually testing it out, making
sure they are suitable and whatkind of additional services or
(15:15):
support requirements will bethere, what's what type of
other, optimization they willneed to do.
So I think that is where it isgoing on.
The other thing is, the C suiteis saying, okay, you know what?
I need to have the new shiny toyand AI PCs kind of fit that
bill.
So we are seeing that there is atremendous amount of adoption
there.
But one thing that you talkedabout this, the security and the
(15:37):
image and all that.
AIPC would be more effective inthis endpoint management,
endpoint security capabilities.
What that looks like, we don'tknow yet.
I think that story needs to betold because the speed of threat
detection is a top priority.
(15:59):
And if AI can accelerate that,that is fantastic.
Leonard Lee (16:04):
Yeah, These are great points.
And, the other thing that I knowthat you mentioned in our
conversation is, you would thinkthat, there's a lot of talk
about the AI PCs catering tocreate it.
Right?
Because of the generative.
Aspect of what we're looking atwith copilot.
I mean, AI is a really broaddomain or field of study.
(16:27):
now we have generative AI.
And so you would think thatthere would even with these,
definitely enterprise.
There's a lot of talk about it,That there would be a lot of
use.
or interest, amongst creatives,within an organization.
But it sounds like you're seeingsomething different, At least
for SMBs.
Anurag Agrawal (16:48):
Right.
I remember our conversationabout this.
Yes.
So it was really interesting.
Yes, it is interesting becausewithin the assembly segment,
also we are seeing not all SMBshave got content creators
internally, right?
Because they outsource many oftheir marketing function, right?
So you would imagine thatbecause of this AI capabilities
coming into the picture, theywould bring some of this in
(17:11):
house, right?
But then they have not been ableto hire that skillsets.
Yes, they have got marketingheads and all that.
But only about 22 percent ofthese SMBs are actually
utilizing AI PCs for theircontent, creating content
creation.
But the funny thing is, so wewent and observed a few SMBs As
(17:31):
to how they are creating newcontent, So it is very
interesting what they're doing,They're saying, you know what, I
really don't need an AI PC tocreate content because what
they're doing is, taking asnapshot of their PowerPoint
slide, for example, putting intoGemini flash 2.
Saying, hey, write some textaround this, and this is my
objective, right?
(17:52):
They take the text, extract it,put that into, ChatGPT or
Copilot, if they've alreadysubscribed to Copilot.
And they said, rewrite this.
Yeah, right.
And they rewrite this and thenthey type, hey, expand on it.
and then they say, you knowwhat, create some video image,
whether they have subscribed to,to, Adobe, or they are looking
(18:14):
at Canva or something like that,like create an image for this.
And the start to plug that in,that's the process of creating
the content, right?
And then say, you know what, forthis, I don't require a local PC
localized to really generatethat.
So it's very interesting howthese SMBs are all
(18:35):
experimenting.
If I can use that word again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really create that content.
Prakash Sangam (18:41):
and the reason is none of these creative suite,
right?
For example, Adobe suite, Areavailable on AIPCZ, all of them
work still on the cloud and Imean, like for, you know, image
generation is kind of far, faralong the way, but there's a lot
of video generation, toolscoming.
(19:01):
Sora is the one whichpopularizes it.
There are quite a few.
A lot of them still run on thecloud.
They are not running on thedevice yet, and especially most
of the professional crowd usesthose professional tools.
You know, they don't run themAIPCs.
I mean, hopefully soon, but notright now.
I don't see any of thesecreative tools basically making
(19:24):
a announcement or anything thatthey'll have this on the, on
the, on the AIPCs.
So.
Leonard Lee (19:30):
Yeah.
I mean, I really wanted to pointthis out because I think it's
counterintuitive.
It's counter to the actual.
narrative and thinking aroundthe A.
I.
P.
C.
Right?
and so,
Prakash Sangam (19:42):
yeah, and also in the create, I mean, remember
the biggest value of running onthe laptop was security,
privacy, your company data, allof that, right?
in the marketing sense, it hassome relevance.
I think it has even bigger sensewhen it comes to, Like the code
generation that Anuragmentioned, you're working on a
(20:04):
project or a product foryourself, you're generating
code, those kinds of things youdon't want to run on a cloud
machine, right?
For example, confidential, allof that.
That's where I think a lot ofvalue lies, right?
Because you have to keep all thedata on your network, on your
machine.
Anurag Agrawal (20:24):
I was at HP Amplify last year, and I was
speaking with some of their HPpartners, this is HP Inc,
partners, and a few of them werefrom emerging market countries
like India.
And they were pretty bullishabout this AI PCs because they
said that, it gives them anopportunity to refresh the PCs
within the Public sector of thegovernment departments within a
(20:47):
country like India, where theysay, where the Internet
connectivity is not required, oris it not necessary?
So we can run some of thosemodels or some of those analysis
locally.
Now, whether that has been putinto practice or not, I do not
know yet, but this was adifferent kind of an insight
there.
(21:07):
So let me
Leonard Lee (21:08):
ask you both this.
We all have AI PCs, we're alleither, we either have, probably
more than one, but we're testingout, we're using, let's put it
this way, several, right?
Where are you actually using it?
Where and when and for whatsituation and for what value?
(21:28):
I'm just really curious whatyou're, each of your.
Are finding, is that valueproposition that you're tuning
into
Prakash Sangam (21:37):
a couple of examples like this one, right?
You use the, what is it called?
The studio effects?
Yeah, yeah, you know, like a PCfeature, which basically zooms
in, zooms out those things,right?
knowing without knowing you areusing them, right?
So that is one for sure.
And then, yeah.
I use, the copilot plus on,Microsoft and then Gemini as
(22:00):
well, just to anything, anyquery I run on board to just to
do a benchmarking, whateverunofficial benchmarking.
So I use the, the copilotbutton, they click quite a lot
for, and if you're researching acompany and a lot of times just
testing out how bad it isHallucinating and so on.
(22:22):
So
Leonard Lee (22:22):
those are very flattering things.
Come on, you can do better thanthat.
Prakash Sangam (22:29):
Right.
translation, sometimes I do, letme put it this way other than,
the, studio effects, I don'tseem to use it for anything
where.
I would have done that on cloudAI, for example, right?
Leonard Lee (22:46):
Hey, I think we should give him, an A for
effort, right?
Yes.
So,
Anurag Agrawal (22:53):
so I know absolutely right.
I'm glad that at least you areusing the studio effects because
I also use the studio effects,but I don't remember to use it
every single time.
Prakash Sangam (23:04):
most of the time it is on running on the
background.
Anurag Agrawal (23:07):
Yes.
so to be honest, right, he saidthat we have got several pieces.
So all of a sudden you move froma think pad to yoga slam, or you
move from one of them to an XPS13 or latitude and you keep
fiddling around with thesettings.
And you don't realize that.
You have changed one thing orthe other somewhere else.
Right.
(23:27):
but of late or the last two orthree days, I did download the,
the deep seek, uh, R1, right.
Using, Lama interface and,running it both on, on the XPS
13 and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon,it's absolutely awesome.
It
was great.
I mean, yes, it's not like the,you know, 32 billion parameters,
(23:49):
but I experimented with asmaller one.
I think is the 7 billion one.
It is.
It is absolutely awesome.
And I have the comfort that,none of my data is going
anywhere because it is runninglocally.
So I think that's where Istarted to use it.
Prakash Sangam (24:06):
Can you run it without internet connection?
yes
Anurag Agrawal (24:09):
you can.
Prakash Sangam (24:10):
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (24:10):
Okay.
Prakash Sangam (24:11):
Like the, but the Microsoft one, you cannot
because it says for complianceand security.
although it's not sending thedata to the server, the co-pilot
plus, model but it needsinternet connection.
Without internet connectioncannot not run.
Anurag Agrawal (24:26):
No, you can, run it locally.
Prakash Sangam (24:28):
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (24:28):
Yes.
you have to download theinterface called Ulama.
Prakash Sangam (24:31):
Oh, okay.
Anurag Agrawal (24:31):
then, Ulama and actually, and then, just run it
locally.
But if you go and try and deepseek on a perplexity or Amazon
and all, then that, that'sdifferent internet.
Prakash Sangam (24:43):
Yeah.
Leonard Lee (24:44):
So I think Anurag gets a plus, right?
That was well executed, sir.
Yeah,
good.
Okay.
But, that's more of a developerthing.
That's not like a normal.
No, no, no,
Anurag Agrawal (24:56):
no, no, no.
And also we are the cutting edgeof.
Technology adoption, which isnot.
The regular user.
Leonard Lee (25:05):
Yeah.
But although you never know inthe very near future, that could
be part of a enterprisedeployment, right?
You might have a enterpriseapproved, model set that is,
officially designated by I.
T.
department as some can use.
And it's pre deployed on yourdevice.
Are you seeing anything likethat?
(25:26):
Are you hearing anything aboutthat?
I don't hear of like, ITdepartments that have gone off
and maybe kind of formalize theprocess of deploying, let's say
certain approved models orsomething like that.
Anurag Agrawal (25:38):
not yet, so there are two things, right?
Because we cannot talk aboutAIPC deployment without talking
about.
Windows 11 refresh, right?
Because of the fact that windows10 end of support is coming up.
Yeah.
Right.
So now the question is.
Should they extend it by payingthat, 60 a fee per user, for the
(26:01):
next extended support for theyear or so, or should they go
with an AIPC?
So I think that ROI or the costbenefit analysis is still being
done by many of theorganizations.
And I think not every PCOM hasreleased all the models yet,
right?
And then they say, okay, shouldwe still go with, Lunar Lake?
(26:23):
Or should we just wait for thenext version, which is going to
come out anytime soon, So Ithink those are the questions
which are there in front of, theIT department, right?
and also what they are trying tosay is, hey, maybe the
productivity benefits.
are yet unclear.
At least 45 percent of them aresaying that maybe price of PCs
(26:44):
is too high,
right?
And there is not enough information and they are
still trying to look for somekind of a,, direct advice from
the experts, who can analyze thebusiness needs and recommend
suitable AI processes.
Right.
Which is the right processor forwhich type of workload.
(27:05):
And I must say, I'm shamelesslyplugging in Dell because I think
what they have done is they'veactually simplified their
branding.
And in a way they are saying,okay, for this type of workload,
you can go with an AMD for thistype of workload.
You try Qualcomm and for thisyou can try Intel.
So I think that's where they'reguiding the end customer.
(27:25):
What we are seeing that 48percent of the businesses, both
assemblies and enterprise acrossthe board are saying, you know
what, we are still wanting toknow some more in depth
analysis, comparing features,like performance benchmarks and
target applications and so onand so forth.
And then obviously 45 percentwants a real world example.
(27:45):
So yeah, so that was a prettylong winded answer to your
question, let me share 1 morepoint with you.
77 percent of the staff time isspent on PC procurement and
deployment, out of which 89percent of that time is being
spent on PC support andmaintenance activities.
(28:06):
So now when you think about thislarge chunk of, IT support time
is being spent on this, there'svery little time to really do
that analysis.
What is the right PC for us tokind of deploy?
Prakash Sangam (28:18):
It's basically more persona based as well,
right?
Maybe because of the batterylife, like the executives who
are on the run.
obviously, as you said, theyneed the latest, shiny toy they
get.
And also the folks who are onthe road, most of the time, like
sales and business developmentguys who value.
battery life and again, nothingto do with AI, but more for
(28:40):
those reasons, those are thekind of first tier of folks who
might be getting these, latestPCs, right?
Leonard Lee (28:50):
So, hey, this is great insight and just, really.
You're proving, Anurag, why youare the chief global analyst of
your firm.
It's like throwing out all kindsof amazing numbers.
Awesome.
we're all at CES.
Just wanted to give you guys anopportunity to share.
(29:12):
What were your impressions as itpertains to the AIPC?
Of course, what were some of theimpressions and key takeaways
that you?
got out of the event this year.
Anurag Agrawal (29:22):
yeah, I mean, I think you guys can talk more
about this because I limitedmyself to one venue.
I didn't walk around like youwere all over.
Different venues, but
Leonard Lee (29:31):
yeah, but I was looking at other stuff.
Yeah, I was looking at otherstuff too.
So, yeah, but, yeah,
Prakash Sangam (29:37):
yeah, so I didn't go to a lot of the a.
I.
P.
C.
folks as such.
I think AMD was the only onewith new, new announcements and
so on.
Right.
All others, they don't make,it's more of a show and tell
rather than new productannouncements as such.
Right.
yeah.
I mean, everybody had that on their
display as one of theircomponents.
(29:59):
I didn't see anything really,really new about the IPCs at CS.
Of course, AI was everywhere.
Yeah, that's a very high level.
Anurag Agrawal (30:08):
Let me say, so Lenovo's pain book.
Yeah, well, the game changer,right?
Because that thing book, they'veevolved their line for the last
several years and the new onewith, when you put your palm
against it, it recognizes andthe screen extends.
Yeah.
I think that was absolutelyfantastic.
(30:31):
Yeah.
some of the other things that they have done
is I think, AI sound studio orsomething like that, they call
it with.
It was a concept PC where youare speaking, you are in a
conference call, moving aroundthe speaker or the screen kind
of moves along with you.
Yeah, that is very interesting.
And above all, I think AMD madesome really good announcements
(30:52):
at, regarding AI CPUs.
And along with that, HP wasthere and Dell was there.
Both of them had made someannouncements along with the MD
on the same stage, which isactually was pretty, pretty.
Yeah, and impressive.
Leonard Lee (31:07):
Yeah.
Yeah, that was the, geez, let mesee if I can get this right.
It was the rise in 300 pro.
And, Sam bird getting up onstage and announcing that, Dell
is going to be partnering withMD to now bring their chips
into, enterprise.
I think that was like one of thebig news items.
here's the other thing that Ithought was, an inevitable
(31:29):
thing.
I think now you're starting tosee the AI PC concept move
toward desktop, right?
So, non portable.
With the, advent or introductionof arrow lake, obviously have a
lunar lake and tell kind ofteased, Panther Lake, but I
(31:51):
think it's really this.
Move up the, PC category, towardworkstation, this definition of
AI PC that, I thought was kindof interesting.
And the other thing is whatNVIDIA is doing, right?
I mean, they introduced digits.
that's like literally aBlackwell, super computing
(32:12):
server in a tiny little box, yousee them bringing their own
definition of what a AIPC is,which is GPU centric.
And then, we're seeing this kindof like meeting of the 2 minds
and so AIPC, I think is thisyear is going to be a really
confusing thing.
(32:34):
So for so long, it's been aboutNPU, NPU, NPU.
It's all about NPU.
And now, especially AMD is in aweird spot because they're in
the GPU game as well, right?
I thought I saw that.
That was like a big, one of thebig things for me.
Coming out of CES
Prakash Sangam (32:50):
and it also, I mean, basically it started at a
premium laptop, high performancelaptop level, going up to the
desktop and there are alsorumors slash news about, NVIDIA
and, Media tech coming out,right?
And it's also going down,another point about enterprise
(33:11):
one full portfolio of,offerings, right?
Yeah.
From a 600 and 700 PC to apremium PC.
So, there are a lot of, callcommon nouns, this basically
series.
And then, yeah, and I, snapchatX, right?
It's serious.
Yeah.
X it does.
(33:31):
It's elite X plus.
Now it's just X.
Yeah.
Leonard Lee (33:34):
The 600 and below.
Prakash Sangam (33:35):
And also, the Leno, I had a few very
interesting, demonstrations, ofcourse The extended rollable
display was very interesting,very usable.
I think we've talked about quitea lot on the podcast.
And then they had an interestingmouse, if you see, which was
good.
And then the enterprise, audio,system, I mean, it's still POC,
(33:56):
that was interesting as well.
going back to main point, AIPCs,so I don't think there will be a
non AIPC very soon, in my view,right?
So, we use it for AI or not,basically, PCs are becoming
AIPCs, in my view.
I agree.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Every PC will be replaced byAIPC.
(34:17):
Is it for AI or not?
Leonard Lee (34:18):
Well, maybe that's why there is, this anticipated
super cycle may not actuallyhappen.
It's exactly what you're saying.
It looks like anyone who's goingto be buying a new PC is likely
going to be buying a new AI PC.
It's not a creative.
Right.
It's just, it's a substitute,right?
So yeah, it's displacing, it'splacing non AIPC.
(34:39):
It's kind of, I
Prakash Sangam (34:40):
think, acceleration.
You now got more reasons toupgrade.
It's not only because, 10 is endof life.
Windows 10, you have to get 11And then if you're looking to
upgrade.
Why would you buy a non AI PC,right?
So it's kind of that's I think,
Anurag Agrawal (34:58):
I think, it goes back to your point about
personas, right?
For example, if there is a backend user,
right,
then you say, you know what, why should I
spend or even if the pricing issame, am I buying one feature
too many?
You
know, through, with, within A IPC, right?
Mm-hmm.
If it's a, client, front facing,employee Yeah.
(35:20):
And say May, maybe I should goin for that.
And then within that, then yousay, okay, what should I go with
an intel?
Or should I go with the RyzenAI, you know, 300 series pro,
processor, right.
And then, I think, we talkedabout AMD as well.
I don't think we should countout AMD because I think they're
the announcement that they made.
If I remember correctly, I thinkit was the Strix Halo up to 16
(35:43):
Zen 5 processors.
Of course, right.
Pretty solid plus PC.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I think that they willrun into this problem about, you
know, is Intel versus AMD, whichone should I go with?
Leonard Lee (36:00):
their client division did pretty well this
past quarter.
looks like, they're making someserious traction with their S.
O.
C.
So, hey, let's talk about thedevices that we've been
tinkering around with becauseit's 1 of the things that I
think, would be interesting foraudiences.
We have all these A.
I.
P.
C.
I know that there's some that weshare in common that we've been
(36:23):
testing out.
So, Yeah.
Well, what are your impressions?
why don't we start off with, thela probably the la one of the
latest ones that we received,which is the lunar lake or, or
the, uh, R edition, Lenovo, Xone Carbon Chen 13.
Did I get it right?
You got it right.
The answer point Wow.
(36:44):
Okay.
Um, yeah, I've been using it.
And, first impression is it'sjust incredibly light straight
out of the box.
It was like a feather.
Prakash Sangam (36:53):
Maya, if you're an IT guy listening to this, you
want to make your CEO, CFO, CTOhappy.
Just give this PC to him.
Leonard Lee (37:06):
Make sure it's haptic,
Prakash Sangam (37:07):
haptic
Leonard Lee (37:08):
trackpad version,
Prakash Sangam (37:10):
I mean, it's incredibly light.
Pretty fast.
I've been really impressed withits use.
I think I use Unison.
I'm a power user of a PC and aphone, interaction.
Unison works fine, works most ofthe time.
(37:31):
I feel it's still a little slowand there is some room to, to
improve there.
the piece is really, reallygood.
Anurag Agrawal (37:37):
is.
It is absolutely good.
I mean, see, think pads havealways been very light.
Yeah,
The previous gen think pad x1 was all the carbon
was also pretty light.
There are things think pad x1nano was also very light.
So it has been extremely light,right?
But I think in this case, withina very thin form factor, they've
(37:58):
been able to fit in an HDMIport.
They've got this USB C ports andeverything like that.
I think it's a no brainer to usethat.
And the keyboard layout isabsolutely unbelievably good.
I still don't use that.
The track point, it's stillthere.
It is impressive.
Prakash Sangam (38:19):
Actually, believe it or not, I thought
they kept it just for, brandingsake, it's kind of defines the
identity of thing, right?
I actually talked to somebodywho said that he loves it.
He uses it.
the track point, it has verydifferent names.
So everybody has their favoritename.
Yeah.
Well,
you
Leonard Lee (38:39):
know, When I, when I used to use think pads all the
time for work when I was at IBM,I used the track point all the
time because number one, Ididn't like carrying, a, mouse
around.
just because I thought it'slike, well, why do I need to
carry something else tointerface with my computer?
(39:03):
but the problem was, thetrackpad was not that good.
Right.
One of the things I was hopingis, with the model that Lenovo
sent me, I get the hapticfeedback version because, you
know, I use max.
Look, Mac books have amazingtrack pads, right?
I don't use mouses or mice orwhatever you call them.
(39:25):
I'm a big track pad person.
And so, I think having a goodtrack pad experience is very
important because.
If you don't have a greatexperience, you do have to
resort to a mouse.
They're like all these deadspots, on non haptic feedback
track pads and that really getsin the way of your productivity.
But definitely one of the bigpluses, and I know some of these
(39:48):
improvements are incremental,right?
But that keyboard it'sinspiring.
It actually me.
Be productive and, I have to bevery subjective here.
It's better than, the MacBookkeyboard.
And, I oftentimes, like, whenI'm doing heavy, writing.
I use the think pad because thekeyboard is just so easy to use.
(40:13):
And so I, they've always done agreat job with the keyboard.
It's a huge forte for them, evenversus other brands.
Anurag Agrawal (40:20):
It is absolutely great.
I think that they call it thetabletop go or something like
that.
Yeah.
But another feature I found, I find very.
Useful within this, laptop isthe 65 watt rapid charging, it
charges up to 80 percent withinan hour,
which is
absolutely unbelievably great,
(40:42):
right?
with the 80 percent charge, I think I can
get, half a day to full day ofwork, but only downside is.
I think they need to upgrade thecamera, the webcam, right?
Mm, I think it is, it is noteven five MP right now.
I think they kind of, theyshould do that.
Mm hmm.
Leonard Lee (41:01):
So you would rather have, AI make us look 10 years
younger.
Is that is
Anurag Agrawal (41:06):
Absolutely.
And I I, I think, I think theyhave, I think they have it, they
call it the AI camera or maybethey have it.
in the other one, which is theping pad, 14 s gen six, I think
they have this AI camera.
Yeah,
Prakash Sangam (41:23):
I'm assuming you guys use the slim, seven X as
well.
Yoga.
Leonard Lee (41:27):
Much heavier.
Prakash Sangam (41:28):
Much, much heavier.
And the display of that is alittle bit brighter than this.
It's much heavier.
Battery life.
I think, both were similar.
For me, you get one full workingday of battery life.
More than that, I think most ofthe time you don't need, Multi
day battery life, you play athome, but at the end of the day,
you always come back.
(41:49):
Your home or hotel, if you'retraveling and you're fortunate
and you obviously would beworking in the night and you can
charge.
So both of them are similar.
I actually, you know, used the,Samsung, Galaxy Book 4 edge as
well, which is, X elite based,laptop.
It's a 16 inch and pretty light,not as light as carbon, of
(42:11):
course, because it's bigger.
I really love, the, um, the,Carbon X1, keyboard.
Yeah.
It's very satisfying when you click, you
know that you get it right.
it's a different keyboard, thinkeyboard that Edge has.
I like that too.
I'm kind of torn between whichis the two different kinds, two
(42:32):
different experience.
I'm torn between which I likemost.
So both of them, right.
And then that, and this keyboardis not that noisy.
The edge one is a little bitnoisy, especially the speed, the
shift key.
And then,, for a 16 inch, it'spretty thin and light too, so,
going back to the point, thesewere all sold as Copilot Plus
(42:55):
PCs with huge NPU, but I thinkwhat we are talking about and
what people are liking.
Or not liking are basicallynothing related to ai.
Right.
They're Yeah.
Good pc.
Yeah, true.
Absolutely true.
That life and other things,right?
So yeah, and that's whathighlighting,
Leonard Lee (43:15):
and I think that's gonna be a struggle for a lot of
the OEMs.
'cause so many of'em are lookingat, developing and at their.
Sort of branded AI experiences,how do you differentiate with
AI?
I mean, 1 thing that is quiteevident is that the whole
copilot plus piece PC, launch.
(43:36):
Didn't have the impact I think alot of and and consumers and
enterprises were expecting, andso I think, they didn't get a
boost from that.
And so now everyone.
Is in a race to figure out howdo we surface a value story
around, on device AI, because,you know, most of these things
(43:58):
are cloud bound, right?
they're being served from thecloud.
So, that's going to be achallenge in terms of
substantiating the identity ofAI PC beyond the MPU, but
definitely, I mean, youmentioned the battery life, that
I think everyone's Done a greatjob of Annie and, you know,
really, getting very close to,if not exceeding the Mac book
(44:23):
experiences, right?
The longevity that there hasbeen the trademark for the Max,
I can't say that the X Series isthe only game in town when it
comes to that, battery life, Imean even the standby power, all
day for on the lunar lake or theAura Edition, X one carbon.
(44:43):
Very, very good and verycomfortable to the yoga.
Anurag Agrawal (44:47):
Right.
I mean, even Snapdragon, whichI've been using a lot, has been
absolutely fantastic.
know,
yes, it's a smaller form factor, but the
point here is that they managedto make it light.
Because Dell PCs are generallypretty heavy, but they have
managed to make it light.
The same level of battery life,the screen is bright, so it is
(45:09):
absolutely good.
Right.
But, I must bring up a point.
I would have thought by thistime, dell's AI Studio or
Lenovo's AI Now or HP's AICompanion would have been
further along in the revolution,right?
Because many of these are meantto run locally, take advantage
(45:30):
of this AI capability of the PC.
So I've not seen that, right?
I did not see that.
Yes, there were some strangeexamples at the CES.
But I've not seen them reallyevolve, right?
like Lenovo AI now is built onthis metal llama, right?
It's a local language model andHP is AI companion.
(45:51):
They say that, you know what, itcan help.
The user discover and analyze,perform and these kind of
things, but I really want to seethat evolve and make it very
practical for the user.
Leonard Lee (46:05):
Yeah, well, maybe it's going to be that whole
agentic thing that everyone'spushing now.
So we'll see how all of thatshapes up.
I think that will come with somechallenges.
Prakash Sangam (46:14):
Yeah, I mean, there is actually a good scope
now, to make, And then you callagentic or not made more
personalization, moreinteractive.
For example, even searching forsettings, you could make it much
more easier with the eye.
Right.
For example, like displaysettings, right?
(46:34):
They have now some of it, but itcould be much more.
And some of these examples of UIand they're trying to do, you
can create an image on thedevice and others.
I don't know how much utilitythey have in enterprise space
because, creating a nice sketch.
Okay.
Yeah, so
Leonard Lee (46:53):
I kind of use those tools.
apple intelligence, they havethe image playground also in
copilot.
I, I, yeah.
Very occasionally, but let's putit this way.
I wouldn't pay for any of thisstuff.
Prakash Sangam (47:04):
Good, good.
No
Leonard Lee (47:05):
problem.
I would not pay for this.
It's like, you know what?
Okay, nice, nice new feature forthe software upgrade.
But, come on.
I'm not going to pay for this.
I'm sorry, we don't sugarcoatstuff, so you guys want to do
it.
Yeah.
Prakash Sangam (47:23):
So what I think of the opportunity that we have
is, the cloud is becomingsiloed, right?
You have Microsoft silo, Googlesilo, meta silo, and other
things.
And obviously.
If you're on one, you cannotinteract with the applications
in the other realm.
Maybe since OEMs are, they areworking with Google and on the
(47:46):
Chrome, for example, they canwork with Gemini and they're
like, Lama model on theirlaptop.
And, obviously with Microsoft,all of the copilot plus, things,
maybe they should come up with amiddle layer.
Call it agentic or not, whichkind of, abstracts the things
from, for the user, puts themodels behind and come up with
(48:10):
use cases and users, whichsimplifies the complexity and
makes it useful for the user.
a simple example is, Microsoftoffice, applications.
And then I have Gmail and Imight be using Google Calendar,
for example, or Chrome and soon.
Somehow you have a homogeneoususer experience or something
(48:32):
like that, that Interworking orsomething.
Anurag Agrawal (48:36):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so you're right.
So I think that's what we callis the interwork platform,
right?
Yeah, because ultimately I wouldlike this file explorer to kind
of go away completely, right?
Because every time you have tofind a file, you start to search
for it.
I would know because the PCknows me, right?
They should know me a lot more.
(48:57):
They know at what angle I keepmy pc, at what point I get up
and close the lid and thingslike that.
Yeah, he should exactly knowdepending upon the context.
Hey, I have a podcast recordingwith Leonard and Prakash, and we
are going to talk about A IPC.
It should present to me the AIdata that we have from the
(49:18):
research.
Automatically up on the screen.
That's what I am waiting for.
Now, whether that's based onagentic AI, or it is something
else, I think that's where yousay, you know what, the PC
should know me exactly insideand out.
Everything should beinterconnected.
Not only know my calendar, butwhat problem I'm trying to
(49:40):
solve.
I think that's where the AI PCwill become really useful.
Prakash Sangam (49:44):
Yeah, if you use recall famous or infamous use,
if we are coming for this, thisdiscussion on AI, maybe it gives
a snapshot and a summary of allthe things the recall has seen.
Related to AI PCs from myselffrom others, maybe summarize
this as bullet points for us torefer, right?
(50:07):
For example, something like
Anurag Agrawal (50:09):
I think, but that is done by zoom itself,
right?
There is a summary meetings hereare the action items for
Prakash Sangam (50:16):
zoom, right?
I'm saying everything that I'vedone with my PC.
Be it Chrome, be it Edge, be itMicrosoft applications, right?
So, across the board, everythingis, what Zoom can do is for only
that meeting.
If I'm meeting on Teams, forexample, this is the same thing
as Zoom cannot do it, right?
So, I think OEMs with this, withthe device, they are seeing all
(50:41):
that on the screen, right?
I don't know whether they willhave access to all of that, but
if they can break the silos,combine the information from
different silos and present as ahomogeneous experience to the
user.
That's where it is true.
And I think that's
Anurag Agrawal (50:56):
the promise of the connected business or the
connected user.
When you look at the connectedworkspace and connected cloud
applications, connectedcollaboration, security and
everything, and they all have tobe interconnected one way or the
other.
And probably agentic AI can doit if you run it, and maybe they
can do it locally.
And that's where thisorchestration piece will come
(51:18):
into the picture, and PCOMs willhave to think through it and
say, you know what, how can Ienable this for the user?
That some pieces can be run inthe cloud and some pieces can be
run locally.
Yeah.
Anyway, we are just kind of thinking through
this.
Leonard Lee (51:32):
Well, yeah, you know what?
Everyone out there, if you'relooking for a Gentic AI, UI
engineers, okay, and innovators,These two guys right here, just
give them a call.
(51:53):
Wow.
You know what?
We can go on forever quiteliterally, but I have to tell
you, gentlemen, I'm gettinghungry, We went a bit long with
our first episode here, but thisis really great.
This is really fun.
I think it should be veryinformative to the audience if
they, have more than a 15 secondattention span.
(52:17):
So we do this here, to shareand, help you understand the
market better.
Help you understand thetechnology and industry better
how they intersect and createnew opportunities not only for,
OEMs that are bringing thesewonderful devices to enterprises
and consumers, but, how these.
(52:38):
Devices and the technology can,enrich lives of consumers and
also work in productivityenterprises, and of course,
SMBs, right?
So, with that, gentlemen, thankyou so much.
And to our audience, thank youso much for joining us and
listening to us this.
Far and, just wanted to giveboth of you an opportunity to
(53:00):
share with our audience how theycan get in touch with you and
tap into your research.
Anurag Agrawal (53:05):
Wonderful.
Yes, absolutely.
Just go to dot com.
See all the wonderful researchthat we published and read all
the insights as blogs that wepublished there.
If you want to reach out andinquiry at dot com.
Leonard Lee (53:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
Prakash.
Prakash Sangam (53:23):
Yeah, same here.
All that here.
All that information on thatwebsite here.
All of my research and theinside there as well.
And, so on, linkedin quiteactive and twitter.
My twitter handle is my techmusings.
Yeah, yeah,
Leonard Lee (53:38):
he actually met X.
Okay.
Hey everyone, again, thank youso much.
please subscribe to our podcastit'll be featured on the next
curve YouTube channel It'll beavailable in audio version on
buzzsprout.
You can listen to us on yourfavorite podcast platform.
take us on your jog, on yourdrive and, also subscribe to the
next curve research portal atwww dot next dash curve.
(54:02):
com for the tech and industryinsights that matter in the
world of consumer andcommercial, Tech we'll see you
next time.
Take care of gentlemen.
Goodbye.
Next curve.
Leonard Lee (00:09):
Hey everyone.
Welcome to this next curve.
Rethink podcast episode, wherewe break down the latest tech
and industry events, happeningsinto the insights that matter.
And I'm Leonard Lee, executiveanalyst at next curve and in
this inaugural.
Consumer and commercial techseries.
we're going to be kicking thingsoff with an intro to the
(00:32):
podcast.
So, you know, a little bit moreabout what we're going to try to
do with the series and then,also introduce my co hosts.
Who are Anna, excuse me, and arug, uh, agrawal agrawal.
Oh, my gosh, I'm reallybutchering that.
I'm so sorry.
I mean, I love this guy too.
Anurag Agrawal (00:52):
How can I do this to you?
No, I'm so sorry.
Listen, don't worry about it.
my wife says that I should havechanged my name to Andy long
time ago.
Leonard Lee (01:01):
I
Anurag Agrawal (01:03):
love
Leonard Lee (01:04):
that.
Yes, do that.
Do that.
But hey, look, this gentleman isa legend.
He is an amazing individual.
I'm so glad to be collaboratingwith you on this.
he is the founder and the chiefglobal analyst of tech aisle.
And, we have our good friendPrakash Sangam of Contra
(01:26):
Analysts.
And of course, you know him asthe founder.
And the principal analyst andgentlemen, it's so good to have
you guys on looking forward tothis.
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (01:35):
Glad to be here.
Glad to be here, man.
Leonard Lee (01:38):
Before we get started, please remember to like
share, react, and comment onthis episode.
Also subscribe here on YouTubeand on Buzzsprout and listen to
us on your favorite podcast.
also just want to make sureeveryone knows that opinions and
statements by my guests arestrictly their own and don't
reflect mine or those ofNextCurve.
And, we're doing this to providean open forum for discussion and
(02:01):
debate on all things consumerand commercial tech.
So.
With that, why don't you bothtake a moment to talk about your
background and, your firm.
Anurag Agrawal (02:12):
Leonard, thank you for having me on this
podcast yes, I lead, TACAL,which is a global research and
analyst firm focused on threevery complex segments of the
market.
They are the small businesses,the mid sized businesses, and
the channel partner community.
And we derive our intelligencefrom the ground up, essentially,
which means that we dotremendous amount of surveys
(02:35):
with, these three segments, aswell as have formal and informal
dialogues with them.
Leonard Lee (02:41):
Yeah, and it's really, really, amazing work
that you and your team does.
I just wanted to emphasize thatinto our audience.
Make sure if you don't know who,you know, and tech, I'll are,
you really should know,especially if you're In the,
enterprise, S and B, tech game.
So, uh, Prakash really quickly,everyone knows you already, but
(03:02):
go ahead.
Prakash Sangam (03:03):
Just like any normal tech industry analyst
looking at wireless compute.
glad to be here to give myopinion.
Leonard Lee (03:11):
Of course.
Yeah.
Everyone knows you already.
You've been on several times andit's really great to have honor
on for the 1st time.
And, yeah, so a little bit ofcontext for what we're doing
here.
We're we really want to look atbroadly.
consumer and commercial slashenterprise tech.
And so anything ranging fromsmartphones all the way to,
(03:31):
workstations and what have youthat whole breadth of, devices
that, are pretty importantsegment of not only electronics
industry.
But, also for the semiconductorindustry.
So there's going to be a littlebit of that tie in that we're
going to have with all the semistuff that, we, cover, but,
really want to give the audiencehere a view from an end user
(03:54):
perspective and, you know, thechannel perspective, the OEM's
perspective.
And, bridge that divide, betweena marks and the semiconductor
industry.
So, with that, we're going tokick things off with the AIPC
because everyone talks about it.
A lot of companies that we talkto.
I mean, that's like the biggestthing, right?
(04:15):
For the last couple of years, Ithink.
Is it last couple of years orwas it just last year?
I think it really kind of wentcrazy last year.
Right?
Prakash Sangam (04:22):
Last year with, Microsoft making this big
announcement, redefining PCwith, copilot plus PCs, right?
Last year, That's when westarted and went into high gear
with many launches and so on.
it was their own event.
right after the day before theevent, they announced the set of
Cooper Places based on, CalCom.
Anurag Agrawal (04:43):
so yeah.
Microsoft had a very specificevent
Yeah.
Where they actually.
Brought in all the PC OEMs thatthey
announced,
and Dell was the one that came out right out of
the gate with seven differentmodels.
To be fair, HP had announcedtheir foray into AI PCs earlier,
(05:05):
I think it was the winter of2023.
Yeah.
Dell came out, with some, really big
announcement, their entire lineup with Inspiron and Latitude
and XPS and everything likethat.
They were all AI enabled PCs.
Yes, which was actually thefirst one was the copilot plus
BC and then.
(05:26):
Later on, it started becoming AIpc.
Leonard Lee (05:28):
Yep.
Yeah.
And if I'm not mistaken, theevent was billed, right?
Prakash Sangam (05:32):
built and then, and they had a first special
day, the day before theyactually went.
Yeah.
For co plus PCs.
And actually, AI PCs were kindbefore copal plus PCs, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
so.
I mean, the IPCs go pilot noweverything clubbed under the
IPCs.
it's what's in the name, right?
So,
Leonard Lee (05:52):
yeah, and really the net new has been the MPU,
right?
That really is the bigdifference in terms of, the new
IP on chip that, everybody wasreally making a big deal out of.
And so a lot of this reallyoriginating out of AIPC.
But then, as you mentioned.
There was, the Copilot plus PCand, prior to that, of course,
(06:18):
we had Meteor Lake that wasannounced the literally the year
before.
And then even prior to that, AMDhad introduced their 1st
generation of, um, let's say,let's call it AI capable.
It wasn't, they didn't call, wedidn't call them MPUs at the
time.
It was like, really weird.
but even before then it wasApple, Apple Silicon, that was
(06:43):
the first to have an MPU.
and they, I think they really,they, they call neural engine,
right?
But it is basically you.
And that was like, I mean, geez,are we're going on almost five
years, but, yeah.
So, Where do you guys think weare?
what is the journey been likefor the AI PC?
And, where do you think it'sgoing?
Anurag Agrawal (07:01):
So I can start it off, Prakash, and obviously,
our insights come from the dataitself, right?
So what we are finding withinour research, and we did a
global research of over 2, 200businesses that covered SMBs and
enterprise customers, right?
we find that There is aninterest in AIPCs, right, and
(07:28):
the interest is very kind ofinteresting in a way that let's
first understand that thesebusinesses actually at least 50
percent of them really thinkthat AIPC could be the relevant
foundation.
That is the core AI foundationfor their entire AI stack.
So that is very interestingfinding, right?
(07:50):
Yeah.
We also find that while AI PCsare seen as crucial for AI
solutions, but the currentadoption is kind of low.
In a way, what we are seeing isthat awareness is there, but
only about 14 percent of thebusinesses are really thinking
about purchasing AI PCs.
On the other flip side is theyare thinking more in terms of co
(08:14):
pilot plus PC, which is veryinteresting that they are not
able to connect the dots betweenwhat's a co pilot plus PC versus
an AI PC, right?
Leonard Lee (08:24):
Yeah, interesting.
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (08:26):
So I think that's, going to be interesting
as to how you bridge thateducation gap as to what is an
AI PC and what's a co pilot plusPC.
Prakash Sangam (08:35):
Yeah, I, my pet peeve is.
They want a PC, whoever isbuying it, they don't know yet
what they'll use it for, right?
Most of the guys who are buyingthese latest PCs, more for
performance and battery lifeand, you know, all the premium
features they offer, because Imean, you know, frankly, if you
are in the market for a premiumPC.
(08:57):
You want it or not, you'll buy acopilot plus PC, right?
Because that's where they'restarting.
I still don't see a lot ofapplications.
They're, they're, they're buyingthe species for a.
The application they're dying torun on.
It's basically, we are in theupgrade cycle.
We know AI is becoming big.
(09:17):
There will be use cases andworkloads.
We have to, be ready for whenthat happens.
That's the reason let's start,buying these things so that we
have a good solid foundation.
At least that's what I found.
It is true.
Anurag Agrawal (09:30):
but also we are finding that many of these
customers are thinking about howthey can break up the.
The user workflow, right?
Because with the A.
I.
Coming into the picture, whichworkflows can run into the
cloud.
How can that orchestrate withwhat is running on the P.
C.
Versus on on Prem solution?
(09:51):
And
we are seeing there are four or five different
use cases popping up
quite
One is, you know, obviously the Yeah.
Code generation, right?
Hey, listen, let me run thecode.
Let me write new code locally onmy PC, by deploying some LLM
models, or even having, smalllanguage models.
And I will come to that in aminute because I've also
(10:13):
deployed deep seek on my, XPS 13as well as on, on my think pack,
Yeah.
So that works actually.
Great.
The other use cases we areseeing is around.
Data analysis and clientinsights generation, right?
that means, I don't need to beconnected to a cloud.
I can run some quick dataanalysis, on my.
(10:37):
Laptop itself, or if I'm withina customer environment, then I
can showcase what will happen,whether I'm in construction or
utilities or any type of, dentalor healthcare situation.
We are seeing a lot.
They are also experimentationgoing on in some targeted
advertising or campaigncreation.
(10:59):
And optimization.
Those are elements that areworkflows that are running
locally within the AI PCs.
but Prakash, you're right that,this is a PC that is in still
search of use cases and theproblem it is trying to solve.
Leonard Lee (11:13):
you use the term experimenting and experimental
quite a bit.
So, yeah, I mean, I guess that'sreally where we're at.
Right?
1 of the 1 of the things thatI've noticed also is.
there really aren't that manyapplications or functions or
features, that take advantage ofthe MPU.
And so one of the races that Ithink all of the chip makers are
(11:35):
making at the moment is to getthe software or ISVs and
developers to start coding tothe.
MPU, Or porting certain things,some of the applications
actually tend to be kind ofboring or really narrow and
function, but I think ultimatelymy, my observation is this over
(11:57):
the course of the latter part oflast year and coming into this
year.
Is actually the CPU is moreimportant than, uh, the MPU when
it comes to the AI PC, becauselike you were saying, Prakash,
battery life has really been thebiggest change that I've seen
over the past.
Year and a half, or maybe abouta year, right?
(12:19):
Especially with the introductionof, devices that are running on
the Snapdragon X series, you seethat dramatic change, but then
now with, Intel and AMD havingmade bets, I guess, in reaction
to the Nuvia acquisition, reallybringing some of that, um, CPU,
um, uh, CPU.
Efficiency power efficiency tobear and even, architecting and
(12:43):
bringing micro architecturesthat are geared more toward,
more performant, but also powerefficient compute.
Prakash Sangam (12:51):
Talking about Microsoft talk about redefining
pieces with AI.
I think that redefining is true,but it is at least right now is
more on the battery life, right?
I mean, day to day battery life,you've been talking about for
like what, five, six, sevenyears, but the laptops that came
last year, starting from Excelidand later with Lunar Lake are
(13:13):
the real ones where you arerealizing that seeing a full day
battery life without a charger,really.
Right.
That is an importanttransformation In my view.
I think that there is hugescope, especially in the
enterprise.
I would like to hear what thepress was thinking on rock from
your survey.
If you take the securityapplications, MDM applications,
the device managementapplications which are running
(13:36):
all the time that PC is runningon the background and they eat a
lot of CPU resources.
So for example, I've seen itliterally, you take a brand new
laptop running really good in avery good battery life.
super fast, the moment you puton a corporate image, that kinds
of, brings it to heart, theperformance speed goes almost,
(14:01):
two third of what I had seen andbattery life was really bad.
I think one of the reasons isthere are lots of the corporate
image.
So a lot of this security andother applications.
Which are running all the time,which I think would be
efficiently run on NPU.
So, I hope there is more,development on that.
(14:21):
And while we are looking for theboondoggle on AIU's case.
Anurag Agrawal (14:25):
Yeah, it's true.
And I think, you know, alongwith the battery life, the
weight, I think some or theother with the Snapdragon PCs,
they've managed to kind of keepthe weight extremely, extremely
light.
Which are one of the two veryimportant criteria for PC brand
and PC selection for most of theorganization.
And you are right, Prakash,because what we are saying
(14:46):
again, quoting some stats here,that the early adopters of AI
PCs we are seeing are within theIT department.
Prakash Sangam (14:54):
Yeah,
Anurag Agrawal (14:54):
77 percent of the organizations are actually
using these AIPCs internallywith the IT department.
Also, why?
Because of the fact that, theyare the vanguard for AIPC
adoption.
They are the one who areactually testing it out, making
sure they are suitable and whatkind of additional services or
(15:15):
support requirements will bethere, what's what type of
other, optimization they willneed to do.
So I think that is where it isgoing on.
The other thing is, the C suiteis saying, okay, you know what?
I need to have the new shiny toyand AI PCs kind of fit that
bill.
So we are seeing that there is atremendous amount of adoption
there.
But one thing that you talkedabout this, the security and the
(15:37):
image and all that.
AIPC would be more effective inthis endpoint management,
endpoint security capabilities.
What that looks like, we don'tknow yet.
I think that story needs to betold because the speed of threat
detection is a top priority.
(15:59):
And if AI can accelerate that,that is fantastic.
Leonard Lee (16:04):
Yeah, These are great points.
And, the other thing that I knowthat you mentioned in our
conversation is, you would thinkthat, there's a lot of talk
about the AI PCs catering tocreate it.
Right?
Because of the generative.
Aspect of what we're looking atwith copilot.
I mean, AI is a really broaddomain or field of study.
(16:27):
now we have generative AI.
And so you would think thatthere would even with these,
definitely enterprise.
There's a lot of talk about it,That there would be a lot of
use.
or interest, amongst creatives,within an organization.
But it sounds like you're seeingsomething different, At least
for SMBs.
Anurag Agrawal (16:48):
Right.
I remember our conversationabout this.
Yes.
So it was really interesting.
Yes, it is interesting becausewithin the assembly segment,
also we are seeing not all SMBshave got content creators
internally, right?
Because they outsource many oftheir marketing function, right?
So you would imagine thatbecause of this AI capabilities
coming into the picture, theywould bring some of this in
(17:11):
house, right?
But then they have not been ableto hire that skillsets.
Yes, they have got marketingheads and all that.
But only about 22 percent ofthese SMBs are actually
utilizing AI PCs for theircontent, creating content
creation.
But the funny thing is, so wewent and observed a few SMBs As
(17:31):
to how they are creating newcontent, So it is very
interesting what they're doing,They're saying, you know what, I
really don't need an AI PC tocreate content because what
they're doing is, taking asnapshot of their PowerPoint
slide, for example, putting intoGemini flash 2.
Saying, hey, write some textaround this, and this is my
objective, right?
(17:52):
They take the text, extract it,put that into, ChatGPT or
Copilot, if they've alreadysubscribed to Copilot.
And they said, rewrite this.
Yeah, right.
And they rewrite this and thenthey type, hey, expand on it.
and then they say, you knowwhat, create some video image,
whether they have subscribed to,to, Adobe, or they are looking
(18:14):
at Canva or something like that,like create an image for this.
And the start to plug that in,that's the process of creating
the content, right?
And then say, you know what, forthis, I don't require a local PC
localized to really generatethat.
So it's very interesting howthese SMBs are all
(18:35):
experimenting.
If I can use that word again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really create that content.
Prakash Sangam (18:41):
and the reason is none of these creative suite,
right?
For example, Adobe suite, Areavailable on AIPCZ, all of them
work still on the cloud and Imean, like for, you know, image
generation is kind of far, faralong the way, but there's a lot
of video generation, toolscoming.
(19:01):
Sora is the one whichpopularizes it.
There are quite a few.
A lot of them still run on thecloud.
They are not running on thedevice yet, and especially most
of the professional crowd usesthose professional tools.
You know, they don't run themAIPCs.
I mean, hopefully soon, but notright now.
I don't see any of thesecreative tools basically making
(19:24):
a announcement or anything thatthey'll have this on the, on
the, on the AIPCs.
So.
Leonard Lee (19:30):
Yeah.
I mean, I really wanted to pointthis out because I think it's
counterintuitive.
It's counter to the actual.
narrative and thinking aroundthe A.
I.
P.
C.
Right?
and so,
Prakash Sangam (19:42):
yeah, and also in the create, I mean, remember
the biggest value of running onthe laptop was security,
privacy, your company data, allof that, right?
in the marketing sense, it hassome relevance.
I think it has even bigger sensewhen it comes to, Like the code
generation that Anuragmentioned, you're working on a
(20:04):
project or a product foryourself, you're generating
code, those kinds of things youdon't want to run on a cloud
machine, right?
For example, confidential, allof that.
That's where I think a lot ofvalue lies, right?
Because you have to keep all thedata on your network, on your
machine.
Anurag Agrawal (20:24):
I was at HP Amplify last year, and I was
speaking with some of their HPpartners, this is HP Inc,
partners, and a few of them werefrom emerging market countries
like India.
And they were pretty bullishabout this AI PCs because they
said that, it gives them anopportunity to refresh the PCs
within the Public sector of thegovernment departments within a
(20:47):
country like India, where theysay, where the Internet
connectivity is not required, oris it not necessary?
So we can run some of thosemodels or some of those analysis
locally.
Now, whether that has been putinto practice or not, I do not
know yet, but this was adifferent kind of an insight
there.
(21:07):
So let me
Leonard Lee (21:08):
ask you both this.
We all have AI PCs, we're alleither, we either have, probably
more than one, but we're testingout, we're using, let's put it
this way, several, right?
Where are you actually using it?
Where and when and for whatsituation and for what value?
(21:28):
I'm just really curious whatyou're, each of your.
Are finding, is that valueproposition that you're tuning
into
Prakash Sangam (21:37):
a couple of examples like this one, right?
You use the, what is it called?
The studio effects?
Yeah, yeah, you know, like a PCfeature, which basically zooms
in, zooms out those things,right?
knowing without knowing you areusing them, right?
So that is one for sure.
And then, yeah.
I use, the copilot plus on,Microsoft and then Gemini as
(22:00):
well, just to anything, anyquery I run on board to just to
do a benchmarking, whateverunofficial benchmarking.
So I use the, the copilotbutton, they click quite a lot
for, and if you're researching acompany and a lot of times just
testing out how bad it isHallucinating and so on.
(22:22):
So
Leonard Lee (22:22):
those are very flattering things.
Come on, you can do better thanthat.
Prakash Sangam (22:29):
Right.
translation, sometimes I do, letme put it this way other than,
the, studio effects, I don'tseem to use it for anything
where.
I would have done that on cloudAI, for example, right?
Leonard Lee (22:46):
Hey, I think we should give him, an A for
effort, right?
Yes.
So,
Anurag Agrawal (22:53):
so I know absolutely right.
I'm glad that at least you areusing the studio effects because
I also use the studio effects,but I don't remember to use it
every single time.
Prakash Sangam (23:04):
most of the time it is on running on the
background.
Anurag Agrawal (23:07):
Yes.
so to be honest, right, he saidthat we have got several pieces.
So all of a sudden you move froma think pad to yoga slam, or you
move from one of them to an XPS13 or latitude and you keep
fiddling around with thesettings.
And you don't realize that.
You have changed one thing orthe other somewhere else.
Right.
(23:27):
but of late or the last two orthree days, I did download the,
the deep seek, uh, R1, right.
Using, Lama interface and,running it both on, on the XPS
13 and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon,it's absolutely awesome.
It
was great.
I mean, yes, it's not like the,you know, 32 billion parameters,
(23:49):
but I experimented with asmaller one.
I think is the 7 billion one.
It is.
It is absolutely awesome.
And I have the comfort that,none of my data is going
anywhere because it is runninglocally.
So I think that's where Istarted to use it.
Prakash Sangam (24:06):
Can you run it without internet connection?
yes
Anurag Agrawal (24:09):
you can.
Prakash Sangam (24:10):
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (24:10):
Okay.
Prakash Sangam (24:11):
Like the, but the Microsoft one, you cannot
because it says for complianceand security.
although it's not sending thedata to the server, the co-pilot
plus, model but it needsinternet connection.
Without internet connectioncannot not run.
Anurag Agrawal (24:26):
No, you can, run it locally.
Prakash Sangam (24:28):
Yeah.
Anurag Agrawal (24:28):
Yes.
you have to download theinterface called Ulama.
Prakash Sangam (24:31):
Oh, okay.
Anurag Agrawal (24:31):
then, Ulama and actually, and then, just run it
locally.
But if you go and try and deepseek on a perplexity or Amazon
and all, then that, that'sdifferent internet.
Prakash Sangam (24:43):
Yeah.
Leonard Lee (24:44):
So I think Anurag gets a plus, right?
That was well executed, sir.
Yeah,
good.
Okay.
But, that's more of a developerthing.
That's not like a normal.
No, no, no,
Anurag Agrawal (24:56):
no, no, no.
And also we are the cutting edgeof.
Technology adoption, which isnot.
The regular user.
Leonard Lee (25:05):
Yeah.
But although you never know inthe very near future, that could
be part of a enterprisedeployment, right?
You might have a enterpriseapproved, model set that is,
officially designated by I.
T.
department as some can use.
And it's pre deployed on yourdevice.
Are you seeing anything likethat?
(25:26):
Are you hearing anything aboutthat?
I don't hear of like, ITdepartments that have gone off
and maybe kind of formalize theprocess of deploying, let's say
certain approved models orsomething like that.
Anurag Agrawal (25:38):
not yet, so there are two things, right?
Because we cannot talk aboutAIPC deployment without talking
about.
Windows 11 refresh, right?
Because of the fact that windows10 end of support is coming up.
Yeah.
Right.
So now the question is.
Should they extend it by payingthat, 60 a fee per user, for the
(26:01):
next extended support for theyear or so, or should they go
with an AIPC?
So I think that ROI or the costbenefit analysis is still being
done by many of theorganizations.
And I think not every PCOM hasreleased all the models yet,
right?
And then they say, okay, shouldwe still go with, Lunar Lake?
(26:23):
Or should we just wait for thenext version, which is going to
come out anytime soon, So Ithink those are the questions
which are there in front of, theIT department, right?
and also what they are trying tosay is, hey, maybe the
productivity benefits.
are yet unclear.
At least 45 percent of them aresaying that maybe price of PCs
(26:44):
is too high,
right?
And there is not enough information and they are
still trying to look for somekind of a,, direct advice from
the experts, who can analyze thebusiness needs and recommend
suitable AI processes.
Right.
Which is the right processor forwhich type of workload.
(27:05):
And I must say, I'm shamelesslyplugging in Dell because I think
what they have done is they'veactually simplified their
branding.
And in a way they are saying,okay, for this type of workload,
you can go with an AMD for thistype of workload.
You try Qualcomm and for thisyou can try Intel.
So I think that's where they'reguiding the end customer.
(27:25):
What we are seeing that 48percent of the businesses, both
assemblies and enterprise acrossthe board are saying, you know
what, we are still wanting toknow some more in depth
analysis, comparing features,like performance benchmarks and
target applications and so onand so forth.
And then obviously 45 percentwants a real world example.
(27:45):
So yeah, so that was a prettylong winded answer to your
question, let me share 1 morepoint with you.
77 percent of the staff time isspent on PC procurement and
deployment, out of which 89percent of that time is being
spent on PC support andmaintenance activities.
(28:06):
So now when you think about thislarge chunk of, IT support time
is being spent on this, there'svery little time to really do
that analysis.
What is the right PC for us tokind of deploy?
Prakash Sangam (28:18):
It's basically more persona based as well,
right?
Maybe because of the batterylife, like the executives who
are on the run.
obviously, as you said, theyneed the latest, shiny toy they
get.
And also the folks who are onthe road, most of the time, like
sales and business developmentguys who value.
battery life and again, nothingto do with AI, but more for
(28:40):
those reasons, those are thekind of first tier of folks who
might be getting these, latestPCs, right?
Leonard Lee (28:50):
So, hey, this is great insight and just, really.
You're proving, Anurag, why youare the chief global analyst of
your firm.
It's like throwing out all kindsof amazing numbers.
Awesome.
we're all at CES.
Just wanted to give you guys anopportunity to share.
(29:12):
What were your impressions as itpertains to the AIPC?
Of course, what were some of theimpressions and key takeaways
that you?
got out of the event this year.
Anurag Agrawal (29:22):
yeah, I mean, I think you guys can talk more
about this because I limitedmyself to one venue.
I didn't walk around like youwere all over.
Different venues, but
Leonard Lee (29:31):
yeah, but I was looking at other stuff.
Yeah, I was looking at otherstuff too.
So, yeah, but, yeah,
Prakash Sangam (29:37):
yeah, so I didn't go to a lot of the a.
I.
P.
C.
folks as such.
I think AMD was the only onewith new, new announcements and
so on.
Right.
All others, they don't make,it's more of a show and tell
rather than new productannouncements as such.
Right.
yeah.
I mean, everybody had that on their
display as one of theircomponents.
(29:59):
I didn't see anything really,really new about the IPCs at CS.
Of course, AI was everywhere.
Yeah, that's a very high level.
Anurag Agrawal (30:08):
Let me say, so Lenovo's pain book.
Yeah, well, the game changer,right?
Because that thing book, they'veevolved their line for the last
several years and the new onewith, when you put your palm
against it, it recognizes andthe screen extends.
Yeah.
I think that was absolutelyfantastic.
(30:31):
Yeah.
some of the other things that they have done
is I think, AI sound studio orsomething like that, they call
it with.
It was a concept PC where youare speaking, you are in a
conference call, moving aroundthe speaker or the screen kind
of moves along with you.
Yeah, that is very interesting.
And above all, I think AMD madesome really good announcements
(30:52):
at, regarding AI CPUs.
And along with that, HP wasthere and Dell was there.
Both of them had made someannouncements along with the MD
on the same stage, which isactually was pretty, pretty.
Yeah, and impressive.
Leonard Lee (31:07):
Yeah.
Yeah, that was the, geez, let mesee if I can get this right.
It was the rise in 300 pro.
And, Sam bird getting up onstage and announcing that, Dell
is going to be partnering withMD to now bring their chips
into, enterprise.
I think that was like one of thebig news items.
here's the other thing that Ithought was, an inevitable
(31:29):
thing.
I think now you're starting tosee the AI PC concept move
toward desktop, right?
So, non portable.
With the, advent or introductionof arrow lake, obviously have a
lunar lake and tell kind ofteased, Panther Lake, but I
(31:51):
think it's really this.
Move up the, PC category, towardworkstation, this definition of
AI PC that, I thought was kindof interesting.
And the other thing is whatNVIDIA is doing, right?
I mean, they introduced digits.
that's like literally aBlackwell, super computing
(32:12):
server in a tiny little box, yousee them bringing their own
definition of what a AIPC is,which is GPU centric.
And then, we're seeing this kindof like meeting of the 2 minds
and so AIPC, I think is thisyear is going to be a really
confusing thing.
(32:34):
So for so long, it's been aboutNPU, NPU, NPU.
It's all about NPU.
And now, especially AMD is in aweird spot because they're in
the GPU game as well, right?
I thought I saw that.
That was like a big, one of thebig things for me.
Coming out of CES
Prakash Sangam (32:50):
and it also, I mean, basically it started at a
premium laptop, high performancelaptop level, going up to the
desktop and there are alsorumors slash news about, NVIDIA
and, Media tech coming out,right?
And it's also going down,another point about enterprise
(33:11):
one full portfolio of,offerings, right?
Yeah.
From a 600 and 700 PC to apremium PC.
So, there are a lot of, callcommon nouns, this basically
series.
And then, yeah, and I, snapchatX, right?
It's serious.
Yeah.
X it does.
(33:31):
It's elite X plus.
Now it's just X.
Yeah.
Leonard Lee (33:34):
The 600 and below.
Prakash Sangam (33:35):
And also, the Leno, I had a few very
interesting, demonstrations, ofcourse The extended rollable
display was very interesting,very usable.
I think we've talked about quitea lot on the podcast.
And then they had an interestingmouse, if you see, which was
good.
And then the enterprise, audio,system, I mean, it's still POC,
(33:56):
that was interesting as well.
going back to main point, AIPCs,so I don't think there will be a
non AIPC very soon, in my view,right?
So, we use it for AI or not,basically, PCs are becoming
AIPCs, in my view.
I agree.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Every PC will be replaced byAIPC.
(34:17):
Is it for AI or not?
Leonard Lee (34:18):
Well, maybe that's why there is, this anticipated
super cycle may not actuallyhappen.
It's exactly what you're saying.
It looks like anyone who's goingto be buying a new PC is likely
going to be buying a new AI PC.
It's not a creative.
Right.
It's just, it's a substitute,right?
So yeah, it's displacing, it'splacing non AIPC.
(34:39):
It's kind of, I
Prakash Sangam (34:40):
think, acceleration.
You now got more reasons toupgrade.
It's not only because, 10 is endof life.
Windows 10, you have to get 11And then if you're looking to
upgrade.
Why would you buy a non AI PC,right?
So it's kind of that's I think,
Anurag Agrawal (34:58):
I think, it goes back to your point about
personas, right?
For example, if there is a backend user,
right,
then you say, you know what, why should I
spend or even if the pricing issame, am I buying one feature
too many?
You
know, through, with, within A IPC, right?
Mm-hmm.
If it's a, client, front facing,employee Yeah.
(35:20):
And say May, maybe I should goin for that.
And then within that, then yousay, okay, what should I go with
an intel?
Or should I go with the RyzenAI, you know, 300 series pro,
processor, right.
And then, I think, we talkedabout AMD as well.
I don't think we should countout AMD because I think they're
the announcement that they made.
If I remember correctly, I thinkit was the Strix Halo up to 16
(35:43):
Zen 5 processors.
Of course, right.
Pretty solid plus PC.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I think that they willrun into this problem about, you
know, is Intel versus AMD, whichone should I go with?
Leonard Lee (36:00):
their client division did pretty well this
past quarter.
looks like, they're making someserious traction with their S.
O.
C.
So, hey, let's talk about thedevices that we've been
tinkering around with becauseit's 1 of the things that I
think, would be interesting foraudiences.
We have all these A.
I.
P.
C.
I know that there's some that weshare in common that we've been
(36:23):
testing out.
So, Yeah.
Well, what are your impressions?
why don't we start off with, thela probably the la one of the
latest ones that we received,which is the lunar lake or, or
the, uh, R edition, Lenovo, Xone Carbon Chen 13.
Did I get it right?
You got it right.
The answer point Wow.
(36:44):
Okay.
Um, yeah, I've been using it.
And, first impression is it'sjust incredibly light straight
out of the box.
It was like a feather.
Prakash Sangam (36:53):
Maya, if you're an IT guy listening to this, you
want to make your CEO, CFO, CTOhappy.
Just give this PC to him.
Leonard Lee (37:06):
Make sure it's haptic,
Prakash Sangam (37:07):
haptic
Leonard Lee (37:08):
trackpad version,
Prakash Sangam (37:10):
I mean, it's incredibly light.
Pretty fast.
I've been really impressed withits use.
I think I use Unison.
I'm a power user of a PC and aphone, interaction.
Unison works fine, works most ofthe time.
(37:31):
I feel it's still a little slowand there is some room to, to
improve there.
the piece is really, reallygood.
Anurag Agrawal (37:37):
is.
It is absolutely good.
I mean, see, think pads havealways been very light.
Yeah,
The previous gen think pad x1 was all the carbon
was also pretty light.
There are things think pad x1nano was also very light.
So it has been extremely light,right?
But I think in this case, withina very thin form factor, they've
(37:58):
been able to fit in an HDMIport.
They've got this USB C ports andeverything like that.
I think it's a no brainer to usethat.
And the keyboard layout isabsolutely unbelievably good.
I still don't use that.
The track point, it's stillthere.
It is impressive.
Prakash Sangam (38:19):
Actually, believe it or not, I thought
they kept it just for, brandingsake, it's kind of defines the
identity of thing, right?
I actually talked to somebodywho said that he loves it.
He uses it.
the track point, it has verydifferent names.
So everybody has their favoritename.
Yeah.
Well,
you
Leonard Lee (38:39):
know, When I, when I used to use think pads all the
time for work when I was at IBM,I used the track point all the
time because number one, Ididn't like carrying, a, mouse
around.
just because I thought it'slike, well, why do I need to
carry something else tointerface with my computer?
(39:03):
but the problem was, thetrackpad was not that good.
Right.
One of the things I was hopingis, with the model that Lenovo
sent me, I get the hapticfeedback version because, you
know, I use max.
Look, Mac books have amazingtrack pads, right?
I don't use mouses or mice orwhatever you call them.
(39:25):
I'm a big track pad person.
And so, I think having a goodtrack pad experience is very
important because.
If you don't have a greatexperience, you do have to
resort to a mouse.
They're like all these deadspots, on non haptic feedback
track pads and that really getsin the way of your productivity.
But definitely one of the bigpluses, and I know some of these
(39:48):
improvements are incremental,right?
But that keyboard it'sinspiring.
It actually me.
Be productive and, I have to bevery subjective here.
It's better than, the MacBookkeyboard.
And, I oftentimes, like, whenI'm doing heavy, writing.
I use the think pad because thekeyboard is just so easy to use.
(40:13):
And so I, they've always done agreat job with the keyboard.
It's a huge forte for them, evenversus other brands.
Anurag Agrawal (40:20):
It is absolutely great.
I think that they call it thetabletop go or something like
that.
Yeah.
But another feature I found, I find very.
Useful within this, laptop isthe 65 watt rapid charging, it
charges up to 80 percent withinan hour,
which is
absolutely unbelievably great,
(40:42):
right?
with the 80 percent charge, I think I can
get, half a day to full day ofwork, but only downside is.
I think they need to upgrade thecamera, the webcam, right?
Mm, I think it is, it is noteven five MP right now.
I think they kind of, theyshould do that.
Mm hmm.
Leonard Lee (41:01):
So you would rather have, AI make us look 10 years
younger.
Is that is
Anurag Agrawal (41:06):
Absolutely.
And I I, I think, I think theyhave, I think they have it, they
call it the AI camera or maybethey have it.
in the other one, which is theping pad, 14 s gen six, I think
they have this AI camera.
Yeah,
Prakash Sangam (41:23):
I'm assuming you guys use the slim, seven X as
well.
Yoga.
Leonard Lee (41:27):
Much heavier.
Prakash Sangam (41:28):
Much, much heavier.
And the display of that is alittle bit brighter than this.
It's much heavier.
Battery life.
I think, both were similar.
For me, you get one full workingday of battery life.
More than that, I think most ofthe time you don't need, Multi
day battery life, you play athome, but at the end of the day,
you always come back.
(41:49):
Your home or hotel, if you'retraveling and you're fortunate
and you obviously would beworking in the night and you can
charge.
So both of them are similar.
I actually, you know, used the,Samsung, Galaxy Book 4 edge as
well, which is, X elite based,laptop.
It's a 16 inch and pretty light,not as light as carbon, of
(42:11):
course, because it's bigger.
I really love, the, um, the,Carbon X1, keyboard.
Yeah.
It's very satisfying when you click, you
know that you get it right.
it's a different keyboard, thinkeyboard that Edge has.
I like that too.
I'm kind of torn between whichis the two different kinds, two
(42:32):
different experience.
I'm torn between which I likemost.
So both of them, right.
And then that, and this keyboardis not that noisy.
The edge one is a little bitnoisy, especially the speed, the
shift key.
And then,, for a 16 inch, it'spretty thin and light too, so,
going back to the point, thesewere all sold as Copilot Plus
(42:55):
PCs with huge NPU, but I thinkwhat we are talking about and
what people are liking.
Or not liking are basicallynothing related to ai.
Right.
They're Yeah.
Good pc.
Yeah, true.
Absolutely true.
That life and other things,right?
So yeah, and that's whathighlighting,
Leonard Lee (43:15):
and I think that's gonna be a struggle for a lot of
the OEMs.
'cause so many of'em are lookingat, developing and at their.
Sort of branded AI experiences,how do you differentiate with
AI?
I mean, 1 thing that is quiteevident is that the whole
copilot plus piece PC, launch.
(43:36):
Didn't have the impact I think alot of and and consumers and
enterprises were expecting, andso I think, they didn't get a
boost from that.
And so now everyone.
Is in a race to figure out howdo we surface a value story
around, on device AI, because,you know, most of these things
(43:58):
are cloud bound, right?
they're being served from thecloud.
So, that's going to be achallenge in terms of
substantiating the identity ofAI PC beyond the MPU, but
definitely, I mean, youmentioned the battery life, that
I think everyone's Done a greatjob of Annie and, you know,
really, getting very close to,if not exceeding the Mac book
(44:23):
experiences, right?
The longevity that there hasbeen the trademark for the Max,
I can't say that the X Series isthe only game in town when it
comes to that, battery life, Imean even the standby power, all
day for on the lunar lake or theAura Edition, X one carbon.
(44:43):
Very, very good and verycomfortable to the yoga.
Anurag Agrawal (44:47):
Right.
I mean, even Snapdragon, whichI've been using a lot, has been
absolutely fantastic.
know,
yes, it's a smaller form factor, but the
point here is that they managedto make it light.
Because Dell PCs are generallypretty heavy, but they have
managed to make it light.
The same level of battery life,the screen is bright, so it is
(45:09):
absolutely good.
Right.
But, I must bring up a point.
I would have thought by thistime, dell's AI Studio or
Lenovo's AI Now or HP's AICompanion would have been
further along in the revolution,right?
Because many of these are meantto run locally, take advantage
(45:30):
of this AI capability of the PC.
So I've not seen that, right?
I did not see that.
Yes, there were some strangeexamples at the CES.
But I've not seen them reallyevolve, right?
like Lenovo AI now is built onthis metal llama, right?
It's a local language model andHP is AI companion.
(45:51):
They say that, you know what, itcan help.
The user discover and analyze,perform and these kind of
things, but I really want to seethat evolve and make it very
practical for the user.
Leonard Lee (46:05):
Yeah, well, maybe it's going to be that whole
agentic thing that everyone'spushing now.
So we'll see how all of thatshapes up.
I think that will come with somechallenges.
Prakash Sangam (46:14):
Yeah, I mean, there is actually a good scope
now, to make, And then you callagentic or not made more
personalization, moreinteractive.
For example, even searching forsettings, you could make it much
more easier with the eye.
Right.
For example, like displaysettings, right?
(46:34):
They have now some of it, but itcould be much more.
And some of these examples of UIand they're trying to do, you
can create an image on thedevice and others.
I don't know how much utilitythey have in enterprise space
because, creating a nice sketch.
Okay.
Yeah, so
Leonard Lee (46:53):
I kind of use those tools.
apple intelligence, they havethe image playground also in
copilot.
I, I, yeah.
Very occasionally, but let's putit this way.
I wouldn't pay for any of thisstuff.
Prakash Sangam (47:04):
Good, good.
No
Leonard Lee (47:05):
problem.
I would not pay for this.
It's like, you know what?
Okay, nice, nice new feature forthe software upgrade.
But, come on.
I'm not going to pay for this.
I'm sorry, we don't sugarcoatstuff, so you guys want to do
it.
Yeah.
Prakash Sangam (47:23):
So what I think of the opportunity that we have
is, the cloud is becomingsiloed, right?
You have Microsoft silo, Googlesilo, meta silo, and other
things.
And obviously.
If you're on one, you cannotinteract with the applications
in the other realm.
Maybe since OEMs are, they areworking with Google and on the
(47:46):
Chrome, for example, they canwork with Gemini and they're
like, Lama model on theirlaptop.
And, obviously with Microsoft,all of the copilot plus, things,
maybe they should come up with amiddle layer.
Call it agentic or not, whichkind of, abstracts the things
from, for the user, puts themodels behind and come up with
(48:10):
use cases and users, whichsimplifies the complexity and
makes it useful for the user.
a simple example is, Microsoftoffice, applications.
And then I have Gmail and Imight be using Google Calendar,
for example, or Chrome and soon.
Somehow you have a homogeneoususer experience or something
(48:32):
like that, that Interworking orsomething.
Anurag Agrawal (48:36):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so you're right.
So I think that's what we callis the interwork platform,
right?
Yeah, because ultimately I wouldlike this file explorer to kind
of go away completely, right?
Because every time you have tofind a file, you start to search
for it.
I would know because the PCknows me, right?
They should know me a lot more.
(48:57):
They know at what angle I keepmy pc, at what point I get up
and close the lid and thingslike that.
Yeah, he should exactly knowdepending upon the context.
Hey, I have a podcast recordingwith Leonard and Prakash, and we
are going to talk about A IPC.
It should present to me the AIdata that we have from the
(49:18):
research.
Automatically up on the screen.
That's what I am waiting for.
Now, whether that's based onagentic AI, or it is something
else, I think that's where yousay, you know what, the PC
should know me exactly insideand out.
Everything should beinterconnected.
Not only know my calendar, butwhat problem I'm trying to
(49:40):
solve.
I think that's where the AI PCwill become really useful.
Prakash Sangam (49:44):
Yeah, if you use recall famous or infamous use,
if we are coming for this, thisdiscussion on AI, maybe it gives
a snapshot and a summary of allthe things the recall has seen.
Related to AI PCs from myselffrom others, maybe summarize
this as bullet points for us torefer, right?
(50:07):
For example, something like
Anurag Agrawal (50:09):
I think, but that is done by zoom itself,
right?
There is a summary meetings hereare the action items for
Prakash Sangam (50:16):
zoom, right?
I'm saying everything that I'vedone with my PC.
Be it Chrome, be it Edge, be itMicrosoft applications, right?
So, across the board, everythingis, what Zoom can do is for only
that meeting.
If I'm meeting on Teams, forexample, this is the same thing
as Zoom cannot do it, right?
So, I think OEMs with this, withthe device, they are seeing all
(50:41):
that on the screen, right?
I don't know whether they willhave access to all of that, but
if they can break the silos,combine the information from
different silos and present as ahomogeneous experience to the
user.
That's where it is true.
And I think that's
Anurag Agrawal (50:56):
the promise of the connected business or the
connected user.
When you look at the connectedworkspace and connected cloud
applications, connectedcollaboration, security and
everything, and they all have tobe interconnected one way or the
other.
And probably agentic AI can doit if you run it, and maybe they
can do it locally.
And that's where thisorchestration piece will come
(51:18):
into the picture, and PCOMs willhave to think through it and
say, you know what, how can Ienable this for the user?
That some pieces can be run inthe cloud and some pieces can be
run locally.
Yeah.
Anyway, we are just kind of thinking through
this.
Leonard Lee (51:32):
Well, yeah, you know what?
Everyone out there, if you'relooking for a Gentic AI, UI
engineers, okay, and innovators,These two guys right here, just
give them a call.
(51:53):
Wow.
You know what?
We can go on forever quiteliterally, but I have to tell
you, gentlemen, I'm gettinghungry, We went a bit long with
our first episode here, but thisis really great.
This is really fun.
I think it should be veryinformative to the audience if
they, have more than a 15 secondattention span.
(52:17):
So we do this here, to shareand, help you understand the
market better.
Help you understand thetechnology and industry better
how they intersect and createnew opportunities not only for,
OEMs that are bringing thesewonderful devices to enterprises
and consumers, but, how these.
(52:38):
Devices and the technology can,enrich lives of consumers and
also work in productivityenterprises, and of course,
SMBs, right?
So, with that, gentlemen, thankyou so much.
And to our audience, thank youso much for joining us and
listening to us this.
Far and, just wanted to giveboth of you an opportunity to
(53:00):
share with our audience how theycan get in touch with you and
tap into your research.
Anurag Agrawal (53:05):
Wonderful.
Yes, absolutely.
Just go to dot com.
See all the wonderful researchthat we published and read all
the insights as blogs that wepublished there.
If you want to reach out andinquiry at dot com.
Leonard Lee (53:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
Prakash.
Prakash Sangam (53:23):
Yeah, same here.
All that here.
All that information on thatwebsite here.
All of my research and theinside there as well.
And, so on, linkedin quiteactive and twitter.
My twitter handle is my techmusings.
Yeah, yeah,
Leonard Lee (53:38):
he actually met X.
Okay.
Hey everyone, again, thank youso much.
please subscribe to our podcastit'll be featured on the next
curve YouTube channel It'll beavailable in audio version on
buzzsprout.
You can listen to us on yourfavorite podcast platform.
take us on your jog, on yourdrive and, also subscribe to the
next curve research portal atwww dot next dash curve.
(54:02):
com for the tech and industryinsights that matter in the
world of consumer andcommercial, Tech we'll see you
next time.
Take care of gentlemen.
Goodbye.
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